Paranormal: a Mafia Game

Paranormal: a Mafia Game

“Now it is the time of night, That the graves, all gaping wide, Every one lets forth his sprite In the church-way paths to glide.” -Puck (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.2228)

Paranormal is a Mafia (also known as Werewolf) game inspired by the Western Culture’s rich spiritual and occult belief and lore and a desire to involve eliminated players back in to the game. The game can be played in-person or on-line, this ruleset assumes the game is being played on-line. The following general rules apply:

1. Post at least once per day.
2. No sharing role PMs, images of quicktopic chats, or anything else outside the thread.
3. Don’t tag threads.
4. Don’t post in the main Mafia: the Forum game thread.
5. No communicating outside of the thread about the game.
6. No gimmicks (acrostics, html coding, cryptography, etc.)

Players

Each player is a member of one of two teams: Spiritualists or Diabolists

Spiritualists, excluding a few, have no special powers. They must post in the thread during the day and may vote to shuffle someone off this mortal coil. The player voted off becomes a Spirit. Spirits go to Purgatory where they may interact with players in limited ways.

Diabolists are the Mafia of this game, they can do everything Spiritualists can do. In addition they talk in secret during the night. Once per night they choose one Spiritualist to kill by vote, this player shuffles off this mortal coil and becomes a Spirit.

Shuffling off the Mortal Coil

Each player may vote to remove another player from active play into Purgatory, the vote must be in bold and on its own line. Votes may be retracted at any point during the day, voting for another player automatically retracts your vote for an earlier player.

In the case of a tie, vengeful spirits will eliminate a random player from the game. Note: this is any random player in the game not simply those tied.

Eliminated players are removed from the active game and go to Purgatory. In Purgatory they may have limited interactions with living players. Players removed from Purgatory are out of the game. Player roles and affiliations are not made public at time of removal.

Purgatory

Players removed from active play are moved to Purgatory where they sit in silence contemplating their life or just getting really pissed off. Some Spiritualists and Diabolist have the ability to interact with the Spirits in Purgatory and some Spirits may have the ability to interact with living players. Each night a random player will be seized by spirits and taken up into Purgatory where they may commune with the Spirits.

Day and Night

The day is 72 hours long. The night is 48 hours long. Time does not exist in Purgatory.

Victory

All Spiritualists (alive and dead) win when no Diabolists remain alive after a vote. All Diabolists lose.

All Diabolists (alive and dead) win when their number is equal to or greater than the number of Spiritualists at the end of any night phase.

Dramatis Personae

Town – Spiritualists
Channeler (Vigilante) – Allows a dead player, once per game, to kill another player
Excorcist (Investigator) – May examine a dead player each night to determine their alignment.
Medium – Allows a Spirit to talk and vote each day. Spirits do not count for win conditions for town or mafia
Poltergeist – If this player is shuffled off the mortal coil they become a Poltergeist. Poltergeists may leave a message for living players at the beginning of each day to be delivered to the GM during the night.
Spiritualist – Just your regular old good occultist. No powers.

Mafia – Diabolists
Hexer (Blocker) – Stops all powers being used on and/or performed by target
Demonologist – Every three days can remove a Spirit from Purgatory. The removal is announced by the GM. This removes the targeted player entirely from the game
Diabolist – Just your regular old evil occultist. No powers.

PS – This is the first draft of these rules. They have not been reviewed or tested.

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Author: falselogic

Doesn’t mix well with polite company; his two favorite topics being politics and religion. Would rather be out cycling, swimming, running, or camping. Misspent his youth reading genre-fiction; today, he is making up for it by reading large quantities of non-fiction literature. The fact that truth, in every way, is more fascinating than fiction still tickles him.
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4 thoughts on “Paranormal: a Mafia Game”

Eliminated players are removed from the active game and go to Purgatory. In Purgatory they may have limited interactions with living players. Players removed from Purgatory are out of the game. Player roles and affiliations are not made public at time of removal.

So what this scans out as, to me, is that any players removed from Purgatory by the Demonologist would never reveal their role. Fine, except when are other roles revealed? What if Purgatory only lasts the night, and when a player leaves Purgatory their role is revealed? That way you could make the Demonologist get to choose which players who leave Purgatory to mask, allowing partial role reveals?

Personally I like a no-reveal setup but they’re a hard sell to people who think of reveals as being the only information the game provides players, and probably also people who are uncomfortable with a lack of information.

You might consider signing up to run one of your games on mafiascum.net if you were looking to playtest it, but also on that forum they have mathematicians who calculate odds and argue about game balance, so even if you didn’t want to physically run it you might get a lot of good information on their forums. Just a thought.

Hmm… purgatory sounds similar to how I was going to modify Psychic Magics mafia to keep dead players in the game. Here’s how I would have done it:

Affiliation is still revealed on lynch.
Dead mafia (cultists) can continue to post in the mafia chat.
When a town member (psychic) is killed, they become “soulbound” to a random still living player (could be town or mafia). They are given a night-chat with that player. If the player they are soulbound with is killed, they become soulbound to another player (and the player killed, if town, is also randomly soulbound to someone).

I am undecided on whether it should be a group chat if multiple dead players are souldbound to the same player or if it should be multiple one-on-one chats.

Additionally, I was thinking of giving soulbound players the ability to, once per game, make a post during the day in the game’s mafia thread (though this might make the town too strong even giving the mafia the ability to have a continuous chat).

All this would be in addition to the “anyone can be a scanner, albeit unreliable” inherent in the setup of the game.

I didn’t want roles revealed after death because I liked the idea of another game going on besides the first one with players in the second game indirectly influencing the first game.

There seems to be a push for having reveals. I suppose time in purgatory could be limited to a set amount of time and when it expires said player moving to “the great beyond” and their role being revealed. Though with only a player being killed per day and night setting it at an appropriate period of time to be meaningful might be difficult.

I’ve found that it really sucks to be vanilla town in a game where roles aren’t revealed on lynch. What Guild said about that being the one “power” that vanilla town has and taking that away makes it much more of a guessing game than being able to use some deduction.

Just my opinion, but I’ve decided to never play in a game without role reveals on lynch as I just don’t find them fun as vanilla town.